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Kenneth Heinzel’s 33 years of experience shine through in his recently published book, Private Notes From a Headhunter: Proven Job Search and Interviewing Techniques for College Students and Recent Grads. Throughout the job search process, Heinzel suggests that job seekers never underestimate the power of networking and your network. Ever. Your personal network and support group are two key elements of a successful job search.

Your personal network includes people who can provide you with leads that result in your getting an interview or job. Your support group should include friends or associates who are also currently looking for work. Meeting with your support group on a regular basis allows you to share contacts, research information, and discuss what worked or didn’t work in a job search or an interview.

“Many, if not most, of the jobs that you land in your career will come from information and contacts discovered in your own personal network,” says Heinzel.

Heinzel also touches on the role recruiters and career professionals play in getting job seekers interviews and jobs. Remember these tips: Never ever pay a recruiter for anything. Almost all legitimate recruiters are paid by the client (the hiring company) in the form of a fee that is based on a retainer (fee paid in advance), or on contingency (fee paid after successful placement). If you are working with a career coach, employment agency or career marketer, Heinzel’s advice is to never pay more than $500 for those services. Before paying for services, check to see if these services are available for free through an organization like College Recruiter, which offers a free resume editing service. If you must pay, pay only for three things, says Heinzel:

Help in improving your interviewing skills

Your resume (especially if you’re not used to writing resumes or your writing skills are shaky)

Contact names.

Do you apply for jobs but never hear back from an actual person?

Remember, Heinzel points out, HR’s number one job is to protect the company. They act as the screener for almost all incoming resumes. If someone in HR doesn’t feel that your resume is what they are looking for or if the resume screening software determines that your resume doesn’t have enough of the keywords found in the online job description, it won’t advance to the next step in the application process.

Picture this possible scenario, says Heinzel: The screener is an HR staffer and not feeling well that day, and even if he sees that you are marginally qualified, because he is a Cal grad and you graduated from Stanford… well, so long, buddy.

Remember, there are hundreds to thousands of resumes coming in, so the majority of HR’s time is spent eliminating candidates, says Heinzel.

The hiring manager is the one with the power to interview and hire you, not HR. So what do you do?

Get to the hiring manager – a direct contact responsible for hiring for the position for which you are applying. Networking with the right people at companies is important. This can be difficult unless you have a contact within the target company.

Heinzel provides encouragement and educates readers on the importance of being persistent but gracious. Getting an interview and getting a job is hard work.

“Looking for work is a full-time job in itself,” says Heinzel. “If you’re not putting in at least six hours a day in related job search activities, you’re not doing the job you’re supposed to be doing right now, until you find a better one.”

About Ken Heinzel Ken Heinzel, author of Private Notes From a Headhunter: Proven Job Search and Interviewing Techniques for College Students and Recent Grads taught marketing and business management at Sonoma State University in Northern California from 2000 to 2009. Prior to teaching at SSU, professor Heinzel was an Executive Recruiter (Headhunter), in the high-tech industry. He placed scores of candidates over a ten-year period in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In addition, he was an executive and sales manager in corporate America for twenty years at large corporations, such as Xerox and Ameritech. He and his editor/wife Inese live in Santa Rosa, California.

Companies recognized for exemplary diversity may follow a core set of motives and behaviors, but best practices alone do not always contribute to a high level of diversity, according to a recent RAND Corporation study. “Numbers alone are an inadequate measure of diversity,” said Jeff Marquis, the study’s lead author and a political scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. To reap the true benefits of diversity — like enhanced productivity, profitability and overall job satisfaction — a company has to accept and integrate an inclusive diversity program into its social and business fabric.

While diversity programs help boost raw diversity numbers — ensuring a racially and ethnically mixed workforce — they may fall short of promoting personal development and higher levels of job satisfaction among both minority and non-minority personnel, according to the report.

The report, titled “Managing Diversity in Corporate America,” lays the groundwork for a fact-based approach to diversity management by determining to what extent best practices literature describe the ways to enhance a company’s diversity. Researchers found that companies often strive for surface diversity‚ by focusing on short-term recruiting to attain a certain percentage of minority employees, rather than seeking comprehensive diversity management programs.

In determining what constitutes an effective diversity management program, the report compares the actual practices of eight successfully diverse companies ranked among Fortune magazine’s
Best Companies for Minorities” against what existing diversity literature says about motivations and effective strategies for achieving diversity.

The authors then made a second comparison, contrasting these companies against six others classified under Fortune magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For”–those recognized for their exemplary human resources departments, but not for their level of diversity. The selected companies were chosen to represent a mixture of different sizes, locations and industry types.Not surprisingly, firms recognized as leaders in diversity management were more likely than those known for their superior human resources practices to support strong diversity initiatives, the report concluded. And while best diversity companies favored diversity for reasons related to boosting business performance, best human resources companies stressed non-business reasons like an enhanced work environment that results from improvements in basic recruiting, retention and promotion programs.

“Much of the diversity literature places a huge emphasis on diversity as a way of improving a company’s bottom line,” Marquis said. The relationship between performance and profitability is an important motivator for companies to adopt comprehensive diversity management programs, even if it is not the case in every situation.

Besides motivations for diversity management, both groups differed in terms of implementing best practices concerning leadership and methods of evaluation, according to researchers. The best diversity companies generally fulfilled all or the majority of best practices, while the best human resources companies fulfilled none or just a few of the best practices.

The study also highlighted the limitations of existing diversity literature, pointing out that it lumps all companies together, rather than taking into account each unique company’s unique goals, resources, number of employees, business locations, product lines and customer bases.

Among other key finding of the study:

Best diversity companies were concentrated in certain industries, such as accommodation/food and arts/entertainment, while best human resources companies tended to be in the health care and professional services sector.

Factors that may have a significant impact on a company’s level of diversity include its size, age and geographic location.

The study was conducted in the public interest and supported by RAND using discretionary funds made possible by the generosity of its donors and the fees earned on client-funded research. Other authors of the report are Nelson Lim, Lynn M. Scott, Margaret C. Harrell and Jennifer Kavanagh.

The study was done through RAND Labor and Population program, which examines issues involving U.S. labor markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.

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